Ignota facies hominum (unknown human faces)

Facial detection and recognition, part of the relative new science of computer vision, is being used in our everyday lives without us knowing much about it. Every cellphone and most social apps have this software application. We only get excited when we hear some new development about it in the news, like for example a team of researchers at Stanford University who developed facial recognition software that could distinguish between gay and straight males at a hit rate of over 80% (The Guardian:2017). 

The software works on several mathematical principles like for example matrices and Haar cascades. This artwork is my attempt to visualise this unseen computational process and to combine it with the social impact of classifying faces. The artwork refers to our past attempts of dealing with new scientific knowledge and the history of classifying humans. It is my opinion that facial detection and recognition is here to stay, but that we have not yet felt the potential social impact of this technology.

Some of these faces in the artwork cannot be detected by face detection software, but the software detects a face when we struggle to see a face. Please feel free to try it out yourself with your cellphone camera.